I am delighted, for the first
time to be able to attend – and indeed to report from – the Berliner Festspiele
and, in particular, from the Musikfest Berlin. How I rued having neither the
time nor the money to be here for its Schoenberg year in 2015. Still,
Monteverdi is the focus, if not quite so strongly so, in this, his anniversary
year, so how could I resist? (One of the things that first drew me to the music
of Alexander Goehr was his twin reverence for Schoenberg and Monteverdi; at
last, I had found someone – I now know there are many more of us – for whom the
two could stand as equal gods.) And so, although not quite the opening of the
festival, the opening of my festival came with the first two of the three
surviving operas of Monteverdi, L’Orfeo
and Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria. L’incoronazione di Poppea will also be
given; that I heard in a rather different setting and realisation, at
the Komische Oper earlier this year.

John Eliot Gardiner has, of
course, for several decades been a byword for English ‘authenticity’ – or whatever
it is called now. (Somehow I doubt he childishly defines as ‘HIP’, which
certainly reflects well upon him, but who knows?) But has he really? The
curious thing about much of what I heard here was how curiously dated it
sounded. I am the last person to complain about that in some ways; so far as I
am concerned, there are many ways to perform great music well. Yet, if claims
to ‘authenticity’ – and yes, I use the word in slightly baiting fashion – have always
been dubious, to say the least, here we seemed to have entered a strange
twilight world in which, certain yet only certain aspects of instrumental ‘hardware’
aside, any authenticity was to a world of ‘1970s Early Music’. Fair enough, if
that is your thing – it certainly seemed to be, for many people in an
enthusiastic audience – yet perhaps not quite what was said or implied ‘on the
tin’.

What struck me about much of
the singing – especially, yet not only, from the Monteverdi Choir as choir –
was that it sounded very ‘English choral scholar’, even when it was not. In
some ways, I sympathise with a degree of resistance to an all-purpose ‘Mediterranean’
approach to this music, which has no more to do with Monteverdi than any other
of the phantasms of ‘correctness’ that have haunted performances of his music
over the year. There is something troubling about the claim that Italian – in what
meaningful sense was or is Monteverdi ‘Italian’, at least as we might understand the 'nation' today? – musicians will always know
best here, or still worse, have the music ‘in their blood’. We all need to go
beyond petty nationalism here. On the other hand, the whiteness of tone here
really tended too much, at least for me, towards the bland. It was all very
well-drilled – arguably too much so – yet sounded for all the world, and
despite the presence of female voices, more like something one might have
expected from David Willcocks and King’s College Choir than an operatic
performance, ancient or modern. I’m not aiming for anything fundamentally
different,’ Gardiner claims, quite truthfully, one might say, ‘than I was back
in 1964.’ That seems to me rather a sad way to approach performance, be it of
Monteverdi or Stockhausen. Gardiner’s strange habit of conducting all the
recitatives seemed to attest to a control-freakery that is perhaps not the best
claim to ‘authenticity’, or more important, towards drama.

Another curious feature,
especially in L’Orfeo, but also in
quite a few sections of Ulisse,was quite how slow Gardiner’s speeds
tended to be. Again, I am hardly someone to insist on breathless tempi, quite
the contrary. Yet, in a performance of the first opera that lasted twenty
minutes longer than had been advertised, I missed some expressive variation of
tempo; ‘expression’ was conveyed rather more through somewhat arch dynamic
contrasts. The orchestral forces used were large and somewhat ‘modern
orchestral’ by today’s standards. Orfeo
employed six violins, four violas, a cello, a viola da gamba/lirone, a double
bass, two recorders, three cornetts/trumpets, five baroque trombones, dulcian, harp,
harpsichord/organ, regal, and four chittarones/baroque guitars; Ulisse had more or less the same, minus
the dulcian, the trombones, and one of the cornetts, and with a second
harpsichord. The orchestral sound tended to be fuller – not only on account of
instruments used – in Orfeo, but that
is as much a matter of the nature of the work as anything else. And the playing
of the English Baroque Soloists was excellent; too often in this music, what
one hears is painfully out of tune. Not here: all was greatly assured throughout.
I could not help but wonder, though: why not actually use a modern orchestra,
given the general ‘smoothness’ – the sort of thing Gardiner et al. would surely
decry in, say, Karajan – of approach? Indeed, Gardiner decries in the programme
the ‘indulgence of Raymond Leppard’. I should say this was a great deal more
indulgent, and a great deal less dramatic – in any sense. The Philharmonie is a
large hall; just imagine how wonderful it would be to hear in a more genuinely
recreative approach, the Berio Orfeo
or the Henze Ulisse, there. After all,
what could be more ‘inauthentic’ than performing Monteverdi in a space such as
that?

The semi-staging seemed of another, non-'early' era too. ‘It was not a matter of not fully staging the work, but
that there seemed to be at the very least implied resistance towards a fuller
acceptance of opera as staged, fuller drama – Regietheater, if you must, although the term remains problematical,
at least to me. Pretty-ish costumes, especially in Orfeo, somewhat dated body language and contrived interaction: that
was about it. Moreover, I had the strong impression that was all Gardiner,
credited with co-direction, wanted. Drama, though? Perhaps not so much, and I
say that as someone who has found concert performances of the Ring some of the most intensely dramatic
experiences of all. Then, looking in the programme afterwards, I read: ‘I have
a natural antipathy to the proscenium arch as the only way to present opera. It
carries baggage with it, a certain preconception on the part of the audience
that the eye should dominate over the ear, and that to me is limiting.’ Straw
men, anyone? ‘I think,’ Gardiner continued a little later, ‘an audience’s
imagination, once stimulated, is infinitely richer than anything a clever stage
director can come up with.’ Maybe it is, but might one not say the same about
anything a conductor, clever or otherwise, can come up with? In that case,
should we not just all sit at home and read a score (of whatever edition)?

There was more to enjoy in the
solo singing, although that tendency towards blandness was not entirely absent
there either. Indeed, Orfeo in
particular sounded more akin to an oratorio than an opera, of whatever age: the
genres are far from distinct, of course, yet even so. There were two serious
disappointments: an almost painfully out of tune countertenor, Kangmin Justin
Kim, as Speranza in Orfeo, and a
strangely miscast – or so it sounded – Lucile Richardot as Penelope. Not
everyone can be Janet Baker, of course; indeed, no one else can be. Yet Richardot seemed hardly to possess the higher notes required, sounding merely
petulant –hardly Penelope’s thing – above a richer lower, yet highly
restricted, range. Her Ulisse, Furio Zanasi, sounded somewhat old, even wooden,
some of the time, yet had stronger, more expressive moments too. He made little
impression, however, as Apollo, and again gave the impression of having been
miscast. Encountering the tenor of Krystian Adam, though, was almost worth the
price of admission alone. It is not a big voice, but nor did it need to be.
Adam showed manifold clarity, agility, and tenderness in his performances as Orfeo
and Telemaco. I certainly hope to hear more from him. Zachary Wilder and Anna
Dennis imparted a greatly needed injection of ‘Mediterranean’ chemistry to Ulisse, as Eurimaco and Melanto. In both
operas, Francisco Fernández-Ruedo stood out as a tenor not only mellifluous but
musico-dramatically astute; his Eumete in particular often proved quite
heart-rending. There was definitely a sense of the vocal performances as
offering more than the sum of their parts; it was a pity, then, that the
framework within which they had to operate was not more conducive to the
modernity – and antiquity – of the composer.